One person's view of a liveable city future

Category: Inspiration and Innovation

Exeter City Council’s Chief Executive has given an important and valuable lead in setting a new direction for the city. The Legacy Like many other English towns and cities Exeter’s growth and development has been erratic, sometimes managed and sometimes not. The post-war reconstruction of the High Street was actively managed by the current council’s … More Vision on

Two important decisions this month show that Exeter City Council could at last be facing up to the real challenges confronting the city. First, building more homes After a long – very long – gestation period in the shadows, the Council’s proposal to set up a housing development company has burst into the sunlight. Put … More Put out some flags!

It’s not only our side streets that can be made people-friendly Traffic restraint on residential streets is not new – humps, speed limits, barriers, residents’ parking schemes, pedestrianisation, and so on. Some of these measures have become discredited because of their impact on driving behaviour: for example speed humps encourage breaking and acceleration with consequent … More Reclaiming our main roads for residents

The Exeter City Futures challenge fund approach to making the Exeter area congestion-free is not for the faint-hearted. Exeter City Futures (ECF) is a community interest company with a mission to make Exeter and the surrounding area sustainable for the future. Their first goals are to make the area congestion-free and energy-independent by 2025. Not … More Up for a transport challenge?

I didn’t pick it up at the time, but a recent Exeter City Council report reminds its readers that the Council won a national award earlier in the year for its Renewables and Energy Efficiency Programme. The Local Government Chronicle’s Environment Award was won by the Council for an “ambitious programme of projects to achieve … More Small but significant: Exeter City Council’s energy measures

In a previous post I suggested that our mobility patterns – driven by past and current spatial and transport policies – were contributing significantly to a range of environmental and social problems. I questioned whether incremental changes based on current transport models would deliver the radical changes needed if Exeter were to become a clean, … More We need new approaches to mobility, now

In my post on the Compact City, I noted the different choices made by Freiburg and Exeter in their approaches to balancing the need to provide new homes against the need to protect the natural environment. To illustrate how these choices played out in practice, what follows is a brief study of how the two … More A Tale of Two …urban extensions